In current times, co-opetition is a common behavior seen in commercial enterprises. Co-opetition is loosely defined as a cooperative competition. In a co-opetitive environment, enterprises take into account cooperative and competitive behavior in aggregate to make optimal strategic decisions. Typical use cases include a company making a splashy announcement e.g. bigger and better than what their rivals had tweeted and yet not affect cooperation in other unrelated areas where rivals engage in cooperative research. Other examples include brands offering more lucrative discounts than what their competitors had offered in order to win over consumers based on a blog post they made, opposing industries offering better services in a specific area due to negative feedback on social networks from residents, political opposition beating the rival to that blue shirt campaign, etc. A challenge with current co-opetition is that decisions are often made on “gut feel” or intuition with little or no numeric analysis regarding actions and their effect on co-opetition.
Presently social networks are focused on identifying people/topics you would want to be socially interactive with (e.g., friends, colleagues, etc.) but these relationships do not take into account rivals over which you may want to gain a competitive advantage. It is difficult to keep track of rivals (since there is no friend relationship), and it is also difficult to keep track of changing relationships of former friends turning into rivals. Social media analytics and data mining techniques are used for information retrieval, statistical modeling and machine learning. These techniques employ data pre-processing, data analysis, and data interpretation processes in the course of data analysis. These solutions can be expensive, and might require employment of data scientists and knowing entities, attributes, patterns and data access in order to obtain useful analysis. In addition, some businesses may only run this type of analysis at set times or obtain the information through a 3rd party which could be too late to gain the competitive advantage over a competitor if such opportunity has already passed.